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CHANCELLOR STEARNS. 



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TRIBUTE 



TO 



EBEN SPERRY STEARNS, D.D., LL.D., 

CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY, AND PRESIDENT OF THE 
NORMAL COLLEGE AT NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE, 



ANNUAL MEETING OF THE TRUSTEES 

OF THE 

PEABODY EDUCATION FUND, 

New York, 5 October, 1887. 



CAMBRIDGE: 

JOHN WILSON AND SON. 

SSnibersftg ^ress. 

1887. 



T R I B U T E; 



At the Annual Meeting of the Peabody Trustees 
of Southern Education^ at New York, on the 5th 
of October, 1887, the Chairman, Hon. Robert 
C. WiNTHROP, in the course of his Introductory 
Address, announced the death of Dr. Stearns as 
follows : — 

I was not a little shocked, Gentlemen, on the nth of 
April last, by a telegram from Nashville announcing that 
Dr. Stearns, the President of our Normal College and 
the Chancellor of the Nashville University, had died sud- 
denly on that very morning. I was not altogether una- 
ware that for some months previously he had been less 
well than could have been wished. A letter had reached 
me, dated the 19th of February, which he had been unable 
to write with his own hand, and in which he spoke of him- 
self as having suffered from a severe bilious attack ; and I 
had not failed to notice with concern that on the following 
25th of March he was not sufficiently recovered to pre- 
side at the Commemorative Services which he had so lov- 
ingly arranged, in honor of our Founder, for the twentieth 
anniversary of the date of our original Letter of Trust, and 
that the Address which he had prepared for that occasion 



had been read for him by his friend Professor Penfield. But 
no impression of any immediate or early danger had been 
communicated to me, or, indeed, had been conceived by 
those around him. On the contrary, it was thought by 
them and by himself that his health had been improving 
from day to day; and more than once even on the very 
last day of his life, — the loth of April, — he was on his 
balcony, conversing cheerfully and confidently with his 
family. Before sunrise the next morning he had passed 
peacefully away. His widow and children, with his re- 
mains, reached Boston on the 15th, when Dr. Green 
accompanied me to the Albany station to meet them, 
and the burial took place at Mount Auburn the same 
afternoon. 

The name of Eben Sperry Stearns is to be seen in capi- 
tals on the roll of the Class of 1841 of Harvard University, 
from which he received a degree of Master of Arts in 1845. 
He owed his degrees of Doctor of Divinity and Doctor 
of Laws to other colleges ; but he always expressed a 
special interest in the welfare and honor of Harvard, at 
which his father and grandfather and great-grandfather, 
and more than one of his own brothers, had been gradu- 
ated before him. Born in Bedford, Mass., on the 23d of 
December, 18 19, the son of a Congregational minister, 
his mind was early turned to the subject of teaching, and 
he entered on that line of life very soon after he had fin- 
ished his four years at Cambridge. He was successively 
employed as a teacher in a female seminary at Ipswich, 
in a private school at West Newton, and in other schools 
at Newburyport and at Portland. In 1849 he was placed 
at the head of the State Normal School of Massachusetts, 
— the first of its kind on American soil, — which he 
administered with great success for some years. It was 
in this connection that he became associated with our late 
eminent General Agent, Dr. Barnas Sears, — at that time 



the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, — 
whose appreciation of his qualifications and character was 
so signally manifested a quarter of a century afterwards. 
In 1875, when Dr. Sears first took in hand the establish- 
ment of a Normal College at Nashville, under the auspices 
of this Board of Trustees for Southern Education, he at 
once selected Dr. Stearns as the most competent and de- 
sirable person for the presidency of that institution. Dr. 
Stearns received that appointment accordingly, and was 
also made the Chancellor of the University of Nashville ; 
and in these capacities he did faithful and excellent service 
for the remaining eleven or twelve years of his life. He met 
with not a few impediments and discouragements during 
the early part of this period, and his health and nerves 
were not always equal to the anxieties and labors which 
devolved upon him. But he persevered devotedly to the 
end, and under his untiring care the College had become 
almost all that either he or we could have expected or 
desired it to be. 

As Chairman of this Board I was in very frequent corre- 
spondence with him on the subject of the institution, and 
I rarely failed of more than one personal consultation with 
him, summer after summer, and almost every summer, 
during his visits to his old home in Massachusetts. It 
affords me a melancholy pleasure, now that he is gone, to 
bear witness to the fidelity and zeal with which he dis- 
charged his responsible and often difficult duties, and 
to the earnest interest which he ever evinced in promot- 
ing the welfare of our great Southern Normal College. 
His name must always be most honorably associated 
with the rise and progress of that institution, which it is 
hoped and believed is destined to be one of the perma- 
nent monuments of the bounty and beneficence of George 
Peabody. It is due to the memory of Dr. Stearns, and 
to the feelings of his widow and children, that the Records 



of this Board should contain some expression of our sense 
of the services he had rendered to the great work in which 
we are engaged, and of the loss which we have sustained 
by his death. 

Whereupon, on motion of Gov. James D. Porter, 
seconded by Bishop Whipple, it was unanimously 

Voted, That the foregoing extract from the Chairman's 
Address be communicated to the widow and family of Dr. 
Stearns as an expression of the sympathy of the Trustees 
in their bereavement, and of the grateful sense of the 
services of Dr. Stearns entertained by the Board. 






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